


Youth

by idaate



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicide Attempt, Survivor Guilt, formerly entitled 'M'aider'
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-17 14:10:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12367383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idaate/pseuds/idaate
Summary: [ MAJOR V3 SPOILERS ]Harukawa lifts Ouma Kokichi by his neck out of the exisal, all limp and bloodied and bruised. "H," he says, voice matching his body for once, "hey everyone. What's... what's up?""You're not Momota," says Harukawa, voice riddled with accusation, and Ouma chuckles with a smile that doesn't reach his eyes. His gaze flickers over to Saihara's body. His rabbit limbs go stiff."Nope," he singsongs tunelessly, "I'm not.".Ouma survives the killing game. Saihara does not.





	Youth

**Author's Note:**

> And if you're still bleeding, you're the lucky ones  
> 'Cause most of our feelings, they are dead and they are gone  
> We're setting fire to our insides for fun  
> Collecting pictures from the flood that wrecked our home  
> It was a flood that wrecked this  
> \- Daughter, "Youth"

“Hey hey, Yume-chan,” Ouma picks up her wrist and runs his fingers over the butterfly kisses she’s put there herself, “why don’t you make a deal with me? It’ll be fun.”

Yumeno looks at him through drooped eyelids. “Like the last time you made a deal it went well.”

Ouma laughs, a bitter and dry sound. “Yume-chan really is a bully!” He pouts. “The stakes are way higher, this time! After all, there’s can-dy involved! You like candy, right? You’re human, right?”

She looks up a little higher, now, and he chalks that up as a score. “‘Course I like candy,” she says. “Okay, I’m listening.”

Ouma looks away from her face, smiling like he doesn’t have a care in the world as he traces circles into her arms. “Yume-chan has to agree not to smoke stinky cigarettes anymore,” he says, “and in return, I’ll take my pills! The ones I’m subscribed to take, this time. And also we can get candy.”

Yumeno frowns. “But don’t you take your pills, anyway…?”

“Nope!” Ouma chirps, and fumbles in his pocket to take out a capsule. It sits there, all pretty and big and blue and plain in the palm of his hand, and he takes a moment to admire how incredibly pill-like it is before shoving it into Yumeno’s mouth. “See?”

For a moment or three, her face turns into an ugly grimace and she tries to spit it out, licking Ouma’s hand. But it doesn’t move from her lips, and after a couple moments, she tentatively crunches down on it, revealing that, indeed, they don’t create any gag-on-impulse taste like most pills do, but instead result in a pleasant sugary sensation. She glares and Ouma giggles.

“What happened to the other pills, then?”

“Oh, I flushed them down the toilet!”

“Those were _paid_ for. They're,” Yumeno bites her lip. She doesn’t believe what she’s saying, but forces it out anyways. “they’re important for you.”

“Boo hoo, like we’re short on money.” Ouma makes an exaggerated pout. “C’mon, I’ll actually take them now, so you have to stop smoking ciggies now, okay? Aaaand you can eat all the sugar pills that I haven’t eaten yet!”

He wiggles his eyebrows and reaches for the packet that he knows sits in her sweats, removes the box of cigarettes, and places them on the granite counter, popping his lips for special effect. Yumeno’s eyes narrow but she doesn’t say a word.

“By the way,” Ouma says in a stage whisper, “the sugar pill you ate was the last one. So, actually there are no sugar pills left for you to slurp down. Whoops!”

Yumeno clenches her fists, pretends she doesn’t wish Harukawa was still around, and pulls her sleeves up, hiding the polka dot scars. “‘m gonna cast a hex on you, if you aren’t careful…” she mutters.

Ouma laughs and slips off of his stool to search for his pills. It turns out he had been hiding them in the cabinet with the chipped handle, stashed behind a mug they keep out of fake sentiment more than anything else. “I’d like to see Yume-chan try!”

 

.

 

Team _Danganronpa_ appears and they’re scooped up from the rubble of the school like the sitting ducks they are, and there’s room enough for three more in the helicopter, even if they didn’t exactly expect three at first, even if they didn’t think Ouma was going to be there with them.

That’s fine, though, even though there isn’t room or reason for Saihara’s corpse to be included so Ouma has to press against the glass and watch as they get further and further and further away from the ground, till the Saihara in the rubble becomes a doll, a shape, a pin, nothing. His palms leave red smears on the window when the attendants pull him away into his seat, on his face when he wipes at his nose and only succeeds in making it filthier. The headphones that they’re required to wear look a couple sizes too big for him, but he doesn't adjust them anyway.

Harukawa’s stiff as a board, and if anyone didn’t know better, they’d think she wasn't perturbed in the slightest, but her hands give her away, trembling violently on top of her ripped skirt. It’s mesmerizing, almost.

“How’d you do it,” Harukawa says into her mic, and when no one moves, “Ouma-kun. I’m talking to you.”

He looks up at her, pulling at the sleeves of the jacket draped uselessly over his shoulders, covering up his ripped binder, courtesy of Team _Danganronpa._ “Mm?”

“How are you alive,” she says, firmer, and there’s no mistaking that the lack of venom in her voice isn’t from kindness, but from tiredness.

“Hm, I’m not sure I understand how that works myself,” Ouma shrugs, “but, I suppose it has something to do with, you know, when someone hides the salami, and then I just popped out.”

Harukawa stares at him, and Yumeno wonders how chipper he can sound with such a blank expression on his face. “You know,” he elaborates, “roasting the broomstick, the horizontal hula, making baco--”

“Okay, shut up.” Harukawa breathes in, steeling herself. She’s too tired to snap his neck, right now. “That’s not what I meant, and you know it. I mean, how are you alive right _now_ , and not underneath a hydraulic press.”

“Oh, _thaaaat,”_ Ouma drawls, waving a hand as if she just asked him why he was wearing mismatched socks. “Sorry, Harumaki-chan, for an assassin, you did a pretty poor job of killing me. Momo-chan and I split the antidote you fetched from Saih--” he pauses, “the talent room, and I just. Sat under the press and bled for a while. The plan was to have him act in the exisal and then I’d burst in on my own exisal and ruin the whole jamboree but, ah.” He laughs. “Needed a nap, it seems. And dear Momota-chan seems to have thought I had died when I didn’t show up to trial, what an _idiot!”_

The silence in the helicopter is suffocating before Ouma adds, “besides, those things about people making love to have me come around were lies, anyway, because that implies I’m human.” A grin sits itself onto his face. “And I’m a monster, you know.”

A pause.

“God, that was edgy,” Harukawa pulls at the elastic around her wrist and Yumeno sighs. Ouma purses his lips and he turns to draw red smiley faces on the window.

 

.

 

There’s three at first, three of them all stuck together like rotten peas in a pod, like dying monkeys in barrels, like treacherous musketeers.

It’s manageable at first, playing with special edition _Danganronpa_ themed decks of cards donated oh-so-generously from the Team of the same name. They play a grand total of four games and when they end the fourth they rip up the cards and let Amami’s, Iruma’s, Tojo’s, Shinguji’s faces turn to ash. It’s that burning that gives Yumeno to pick up smoking, dripping her theoretically unlimited money supply into purchasing packs of Marlboros.

She stacks them up on the counter like dominos, corners still crisply creased and seals unbroken. Ouma pokes one with a toe and sends them all toppling over, giggling when she glares before repositioning them himself into a satan summoning circle.

Harukawa looks at the circle over an upside down book and then to Ouma and then down back again and says “look, it worked.”

They all laugh at that, for once, just like Ouma cackles when Yumeno takes her first drag and chokes on it and Harukawa bites her lip like she’s trying to hold something back too.

Then mere hours later there’s broken glass on the floor and Ouma’s who-knows-where at 2 in the morning and Yumeno tastes euphoria as she extinguishes cigarettes on her arms.

 

.

 

They don’t love each other. Ouma’s loved Saihara from day one practically and Yumeno realized they weren’t ‘just friends’ from the moment they lifted the cage to see Chabashira with a face full of blood, and they both _know_ that they’re not in love, for the most part.

Briefly, for a reason that doesn't exist, she tries, and one day when Ouma comes home from standing on the swings at the park she’s sitting naked under the sheets, trying to pass off her trembling as lust. “I’ve been waiting for you,” she says. Been waiting for you since Momota said in your voice that you loved me, she doesn’t add, doesn’t lie.

Ouma slams the door to their bedroom shut so fast he gets whiplash. He sleeps on the floor of their living room with the television on and she sits under the shower and tries to wash away the feeling of his hands on her even though he didn’t touch her and they don’t try to pretend they don’t hate each other again.

The next morning he’s sitting on the granite counter, feet playing with one of the chairs pulled up to it as he eats marshmallow fluff straight from the jar with his fingers. When Yumeno enters the room, he kicks the chair away and it hits the wall. There’s probably a dent.

“Ah, Yume-chan! Good morning!” He speaks without turning around, but puts his hands out to the side in a grand flourish, fluff sagging off in sticky strands. “I have decided that today, we are going to go out to go get ourselves a pair of dresses. Matching ones, of course. Or not, because who would want to match with an ugly girl like you, huh!”

Yumeno blinks at him as he jumps off the counter, ballet flats hitting the tile with slaps that ring around the apartment. “We could always just… order them online.”

“But what’s the fun of just staring at a digital screen and scrolling?” Ouma pouts. “Really, Yume-chan! Walking down the aisles and touching the fabric, really _knowing_ what you’re buying instead of just ordering something on impulse, trying them on in front of mirrors… that’s what makes up half the fun! Besides,” he flutters his lashes, “I’m gracing the world with my presence, you know? What _lucky_ girl is going to get to see _the_ Ouma Kokichi try out a dress, I wonder?”

“You say that as if you’re into those sorta people…” Yumeno drawls, and Ouma laughs with genuine humor and snaps his fingers.

“Mm, guilty as charged!”

Nonetheless, sorting through their closet for disguises proves to even be _fun,_ turning scarves into beards and the marshmallow fluff from Ouma's fingers into bushy eyebrows. It's useless, even a pain, of course, because they realize how inefficient having food in their hair is and they spend an hour washing it all out, Ouma whining and pointing fingers at Yumeno even though it was _his_ idea all along.

They settle for simply putting their hair under hats (“if they figure out it's us, it’ll be your fault entirely, yume-chan! can’t hide your iconic ugliness, no matter how you try”) and within an hour, they're out of their apartment and off the tram and in the fanciest clothing store nearby that isn't too big because those can get overwhelming too fast and isn't too small because those make you squish between aisles and people and Yumeno _really_ doesn't feel like squishing up against someone.

“Welcome!” says an attendant as a small bell rings, signaling their entrance. Yumeno counts the seconds on the hands held behind her back, one two three, but the attendant’s welcoming faux smile doesn’t shift to one of recognition. She breathes a sigh of relief, and Ouma skips ahead like it’s nothing.

She feels as if she’s in one of those cliche scenes in anime or what have you where it’s a montage of people standing in front of changing room doors and every single time the doors open, they’re in a new set of stunning clothes.

Yumeno picks out her dress with the thought ‘would Chabashira like this’ on her mind and she has to bite her lip, grounding herself before she can continue. Of course Chabashira would love it, who was she kidding. She’d love absolutely anything that Yumeno wore. Yumeno could wear a trash bag, for God’s sake, and Chabashira would praise it to the moon and back.

She doesn’t deserve that. Yumeno quivers and picks out an olive green dress with white underskirts. There’s a bow in the front that she can pull as tight as she wants and it takes an embarrassing amount of restraint not to pull it tight, tight, tight as she can and squeeze all the guts and blood out of her body till she's nothing but skin and bones.

She finds matching gloves, too, snow colored ones that cover her scars and slip under her grasp. She kisses them and then flushes red as Ouma points and laughs and laughs and laughs.

Ouma shifts like a rainbow, from ocean skies to clown suits to pumpkin patches to blueberries, and he looks magnificent in every single one of them. The folds float from his arms like fairy wings, a fact that he comments on himself as he peers in the mirror with a grin.

“Maybe they should have made me the Super High-School Level Fashionista!” he says snapping selfies, then laughs as he tosses yet another dress away. “Of course, that’s a filled in role already. A real downer!”

Ouma settles on a pink dress, the kind they call ‘lolita’ with so many folds and waves that it makes Yumeno dizzy. He buttons up the front with tender fingers and pulls on the cuffs of his sleeves, huffing as he sticks out a hip to the side and posing in front of the mirror fifty three different ways before he dubs himself somewhat satisfied.

“So,” Ouma says, spinning around and letting the dress billow out around him, “how do you think I look? Do you think,” he taps his chin, “that my beloved Saihara-chan would’ve thought me cute enough to sweep me off my feet in this? How _romantic,_ heh!”

Yumeno puts down the bangles she was examining and looks over Ouma instead. “Yeah,” she answers honestly, “I think that if you were to meet Saihara in that, he’d really like it.”

Ouma pauses and blinks owlishly at Yumeno before erupting into a spout of giggles. “Eh, Yume-chan is trying to flirt with me, even though she’s just an ugly fake magician!” he whines. “Well, too bad for you, I’m _way_ out of your league! And, even if I wasn’t, I’ve already stolen my beloved Saihara-chan’s heart.” He clasps his chest and looks upwards at the sky. “And he, mine.”

Yumeno rolls her eyes. “Nyeh… so, are you getting this one? Or somethin’ else.”

“Why, of _course_ this one!”

Ouma hurriedly changes back into a lighter set of clothes and the cashier rings up their purchases. For once, they don’t bother putting their hats back on as they ride the bus, and either no one notices it’s them or no one feels like approaching them but they make it home safe and sound. Ouma clutches the bag containing his dress like a lifeline.

 

.

 

Food is a problem, because Ouma refuses to eat anything that he didn’t open and eat straight from the packet himself when he eats at all, which is understandable (“yume-chan will surely poison me if i’m not careful!”). Yumeno settles for leftovers, or at least, things that Ouma’s already opened but hasn’t finished - a bag of chips, a bar of chocolate, a cup of ramen.

Yumeno only bothers asking him once, and he stares at her funny before saying “it’s because if the food has been out there for a while, then people would have gone and poisoned it already, of _course,”_ and opens a new pack of bread that Yumeno knows she’ll have to eat ninety percent of (even more if you count the crusts ouma picks off).

She doesn't bother pointing out to him that someone could stick a needle through the packaging and poison the food that way or the food could have been poisoned before it even got put into the packaging because she's afraid if she does, Ouma won't eat anything at all.

So she doesn't.

 

.

 

Chabashira Tenko. Cha-ba-shi-ra Ten-ko. _Chah-bah-shee-rah._ Tea stalk.

Yumeno read somewhere that holding a tea cup was akin to the feeling of keeping someone’s hand in yours, the heat emanating from the cup mimicking human warmth and bringing one comfort, because the human brain was glitchy like that.

She tells Ouma the fact one morning absentmindedly as he stirs seven sugar cubes into his tea, and he stares at her before laughing and draining his tea down his throat. “Good to know if I’m ever alone as you I can always count on some shitty leaf water to perk me right back up!” he says, and Yumeno sighs and turns on the rice cooker.

It’s possible that Tenko had liked tea, definitely. At the very least, Tenko had loved it when Yumeno made her tea, but Tenko had loved it when Yumeno did practically anything so that doesn't count. Yumeno could pass gas and Tenko would smile through it and say it was the sweetest scent she had ever did smell, probably.

But a lot of people liked tea, and Tenko was _named_ after tea, dear God, so either she hated or loved her namesake but Yumeno was going to place her bets on the latter.

At least, that's the justification she gives herself when she stutters her steps into a plant nursery and stutters out with a pot of camellia sinensis (a fancy name that she trips over trying to pronounce) held firmly in her hands. Ouma only looks at it when she drops it in front of his face with a huff, hands on her hips and chest heaving.

“Well?” he raises an eyebrow. “What’s this?”

“It’s a plant, dummy.”

“Yume-chan, I’m not as dumb as you,” Ouma rolls his eyes and pokes at one of the leaves. “I suppose a more apt question would be… why? Why’d you get this dumb plant?” Yumeno bites her lip and Ouma adds, “it’s almost as ugly as you.”

“It makes tea,” Yumeno says, frustrated, and Ouma raises his other eyebrow.

“Tea, huh?”

“Yeah, huh.”

“Poisonous tea?” Ouma pokes one of the leaves, and Yumeno scoots it away. “Is Yume-chan gonna poison me?”

“No, ‘m not,” she says, increasingly annoyed. “I just thought. It might be nice, you know? To have a tea plant. We can make our own teas with it.”

“Oo!” Ouma sits up at that, flipping himself over and propping his chin up with an absentminded hand. “Sounds terrible. What kinds of teas?”

“I dunno,” Yumeno says, feeling dumber by the minute, “but it’s tea and it’s my plant and I like it, so it doesn’t matter what you think.”

“Does it not? But Yume-chan, I’ll be living in the very same house as this plant!” Ouma bears his teeth at the shrub, mock growling. “If you’re not caaaareful, I could kill it!”

“You won’t,” says Yumeno, and Ouma laughs and turns over on the couch, tapping away at a new game he’ll get bored of within the hour.

Yumeno sets the plant up besides her bed and claps once, twice, and hopes Tenko is watching.

 

.

 

Going to get their prescriptions once a month is super fun!

Except, not really, because that was a lie that even _Ouma_ would be ashamed of telling.

Harukawa cuts her hair, Ouma stuffs his in a hat and Yumeno’s puts hers under a wig and they all don heavy jackets that look significantly less suspicious than usual if only because it’s nearly winter, now.

The aisles of the pharmacy are bright and shiny and raw. Yumeno picks up a new stuffed lion after Ouma steals the first one from her, and ignores him as he makes sound effects with his mouth and make the little lion’s paws slap against her arm. Harukawa’s feet tap against the linoleum floors and she groans.

“There’s no way they don’t know who we are,” she says. “They know it’s us and they’re keeping us waiting here so they can. Fuck.” She breathes out of her nose. “I dunno.”

“No they don’t,” says Yumeno, and Ouma makes an explosion noise and drops the lion to the ground. Harukawa sighs.

“I know,” she mutters, but her foot doesn’t stop tapping. Ouma crouches on the ground to pick up the lion and nudge it onto her foot, growling all the time. She pauses. “Not right now, Ouma-kun.”

Ouma makes a whine from the back of his throat but relents, rolling onto the heels of his feet and putting the lion on his face. “If you lick that, we hafta buy it,” Yumeno says, and Ouma’s tongue darts out and licks the lion’s fur. Harukawa grimaces.

“Do you _know_ where that’s been…?”

“On Harumaki-chan’s foot!”

“Well,” Harukawa says.

“Anyway… no one knows it’s us!” Ouma mumbles around the lion, changing the topic. “Or at least, if they do, they don’t care. And if they _do_ know it’s us, what’s the point? So they know, we sign a few things, maybe they take some photos and post it online, it doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter,” Yumeno says, and Ouma picks up his lion by its tail.

“Mm, why do you say that? Oh, maybe Yumeno-chan _does_ want something like that to happen?” Ouma lets out a low whistle. “I wouldn’t be surprised, now that I’m thinking about it! Because then they could edit your face to be not ugly, or they could edit your head onto someone else’s body so you don’t have a chest flatter than a cutting board… oh, oh! Is that your fantasy?” Ouma leans forward. “Do you want a head transplant, Yumeno-chan? Do you hate your body? That’s a bit too relatable of a--”

Harukawa hits Ouma upside the head. “Shut up.”

Ouma sticks out his tongue, but shuts up. Yumeno picks up the lion off of his face. “We gotta buy this, now…”

“We gotta!” Ouma chimes in, and Harukawa drags a hand down her face.

“We _don’t--”_

“Excuse me?” calls the attendant from across the counter. “We finished preparing your prescriptions, so if you could p--”

“Can we buy this?” Ouma practically slams the lion onto the counter, and Yumeno puts back her own lion as the attendant blinks.

“Er, of _course_ sir, let me just ring that up for you…”

They leave the pharmacy with little white baggies filled with bottles of pills and a lion that Ouma pretends to ride on, even though it’s far too tiny. He ends up forgetting about it within a week, and Yumeno picks it up from the laundry. The seams on one of the legs has already begun to come undone, and stuffing leaks out like snowy intestines.

 

.

 

“How are you doing that?”

Yumeno looks up from the sink, pausing in her morning ritual of brushing her teeth to look at Ouma leaning precariously against the door’s frame. If she didn’t know better, she’d ask if something was wrong, but she already saw the reason when he forgot to flush it down the toilet.

“Doing what?” she says around a mouthful of suds, and then when he doesn’t respond, she spits it out and raises an eyebrow. “Like, brushin’ my teeth…? Do ya not brush your teeth, Ouma?”

“Not _that.”_ Ouma rolls his eyes. “Jeez, I’m not as disgusting as you, Yume-chan. I’m talking about,” he pauses, then puffs out his cheeks and says “gurg gurg gurg gurg gurg.”

“I,” Yumeno chokes back laughter and has to pause, spitting out more of nothing into the sink. “You mean, like, gurgling? Water?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Ouma shrugs.

“Uhm.” Yumeno pushes herself up against the sink. “You just… do this?” She picks up the small cup of water she had been using beforehand, and throwing the water into her mouth, tips her head back and gurgles the water. “Nyeh… even I can do it, so, so can you.”

“Ah! So you admit you're a pathetic, untalented magician, then!” Ouma nods to himself, stroking his chin. “I see, I see.”

“Okay, then,” Yumeno huffs, miffed, and hands him the cup. “You try.”

Ouma throws his head back with the cup at his lips, tries gurgling the water, and chokes. Yumeno laughs as Ouma coughs frantically into the sink. “Yume-chan is a witch!” Ouma wails when he catches his breath. “Yume-chan made me choke and hurt my throat and tried to kill me! So _meaaan!”_

“If killing you was that easy, I’d have done it long ago,” Yumeno says, and Ouma smiles a smile identical to the ones in the killing game.

“Good thing I’m just incredibly hard to kill!” he singsongs, tapping Yumeno lightly on the nose and making her wrinkle her face up. “Gurgling with you was fun, though, Yume-chan! Gurgle gurgle, gurgle gurgle!”

Ouma takes another sip of water into his mouth, swishes it around, and spits it at Yumeno, making her shriek and him giggle.

 

.

 

Harukawa hates Ouma, Yumeno hates Ouma, and Ouma either hates himself or both of them or all three of them together - that's the sort of toxic, broken truth that they all share unspokenly, because they don’t share much else besides having dead sweethearts and having hair the color of bruises.

That’s why Ouma sleeps all alone in the second bedroom instead of in the first with Harukawa and Yumeno, though he sticks out his tongue and says it’s because “girls and boys shouldn’t be sleeping together, who knows what sort of indecent things could happen!” Nevermind that sort of logic doesn’t make much of any sense anymore, but they’re desperate for any sort of logic, nowadays.

Yumeno wakes up with the space besides her cold, and when she grasps for Harukawa’s form in the dark blindly she finds nothing there.

Panic flares up in her chest, but logic splashes water on her face and promises that Harukawa’s just gone to the bathroom. She counts sheep, one, two, seven, sixteen, twenty-three, forty. She calms down.

She turns over underneath the covers and tries closing her eyes. In the silence, everything becomes painfully loud to her ears; the covers that shift under her weight, the whir of the ceiling fan, Ouma’s feeble noises, the pounding of her heart, the tick of the analog clo--

Yumeno throws the covers off of her and trips out of her room and down the hallway into Ouma’s.

The door is open, and when she steps through, Harukawa’s sitting over Ouma with her hands securely around his throat and he _isn’t moving._

(in the back of her mind, she can already hear monokuma cackling and announcing the discovery of yet another body)

“H, Harukawa,” Yumeno says, but Harukawa isn’t moving either.

There's a second of pure fear where she’s afraid that Ouma’s already dead, but no, she can see his chest fluttering up and down like an injured butterfly.

In what feels like one stride but is probably a stuttered twenty Yumeno’s across the room and clinging onto Harukawa’s shoulders, feeling the other girl’s heart thrum underneath her like an engine. “Yumeno,” Harukawa says, and she sounds so gone that it scares the redhead.

“Stop it,” her voice cracks, but she’s desperate. “Stop it. Stop it. You’re hurting him.”

“He killed them,” Harukawa says. “He killed Iruma and Gonta and Saihara and Momota. It’s his fault that they’re dead. It’s all,”

Ouma makes a noise and Yumeno refuses to look at him.

“it’s all his fault.”

Yumeno buries her face in Harukawa’s hair and breathes in the smell of citrus shampoo to cover the phantom smell of blood. “You’re not going to accomplish anything like this,” she hiccups, “you’re-- you’re not going to. Nothing’s going to. To change. Ouma will be dead, and then… then what?”

Harukawa doesn’t say anything, but she’s shaking now.

“Please,” she says, grip tightening on Harukawa’s trembling shoulders, “please, no more killing.”

Murder isn't legal if it’s not on reality television, after all.

Harukawa finally removes her hands from Ouma’s neck violently, as if she had been scalded with boiling water. “He isn’t even fighting back. He knows he deserves it,” she says, but her voice looks number than her face and Yumeno can't tell if she means it or not.

“I’ll join you in our room in,” Yumeno pinches her nose, “inna… little bit.”

Harukawa turns on her heel and leaves the room.

Yumeno lets go of a breath that she hadn't realized she had been holding and glances over at Ouma. He’s still laying on the bed, and Yumeno turns on the small salt rock lamp by their bedside table. His stark white skin looks fuller in the pink-gold glow, shadows burning themselves into his face and giving him _color_ for once.

“Hey,” Yumeno says belatedly, “you okay?”

No response. She waves her hands in front of his face, but his eyes don’t track. He looks gone, more gone than some of the addicts in movies look, but those were _movies_ so why does she even bother comparing them, stupid Yumeno.

“You alive?” she asks, and then, “if you’re not I hafta cast a really big necromancy spell, and… that takes out a lotta MP… nnn.”

There’s still no response and Yumeno has to pause for a second when she stands up, steadying her knocking knees before wobbling over to the bathroom and grabbing one of the little paper cups they use for cleaning their mouth and filling it to the brim with the coldest water she can. She wobbles back to Ouma, spilling most of the water on her way back anyways.

“Last chance,” she says.

He doesn’t so much as blink.

Yumeno dumps the remainder of the cup’s contents on his face.

Ouma springs up like a jack in the box, gasping, and his attempt at running out of the bedroom ends up with him running into the door instead. He slams into the door, then into a wall when he switches directions, and then trips onto the ground. Yumeno steps closer only to have him pull his legs up closer around him (as if that would protect him).

He’s breathing funny, and Yumeno crouches across from him, hands on her knees, like she's kneeling down to talk to a scared animal. This time, when she snaps her fingers, his eyes flicker up to follow and it’s the addicts in the movies that look more gone, now.

She counts four, seven, ten in her head and then Ouma’s devilish grin slinks back on. His breathing evens out.

“Hey hey, Yumeno-chan,” he stage whispers. “How badly do you think I scared Harumaki-chan?”

“Probably not at all,” Yumeno answers honestly.

“Aw,” Ouma pouts childishly. Then, “did you get spooked, at the very least?”

“A little.”

“Nishishi, tricked you.”

“Do you want…” what would Chabashira do, what would Tenko do, “do you want some… milk? Hot chocolate?”

“Yumeno-chan? Making _me_ hot chocolate? Are you sure I haven’t cast a hex on you, now?”

“I’ll get hot chocolate, then.”

“Thanks, Yume-chan,” Ouma says when Yumeno returns with the cup, already positioned happily in bed. “Yume-chan… yeah, yume, like a bad dream! That’s what you are!” He swallows the hot chocolate down in a single gulp and Yumeno’s too tired to respond as he flips himself over and burrows himself into the blankets.

Yumeno returns to her own bedroom and Harukawa still isn’t there. She goes to sleep with the space besides her still cold.

Waking up at four pm the next day reveals that Harukawa’s gone, gone with all her red scrunchies and black knee high socks. The lack of the gentle heat in the kitchen that the rice cooker had provided leaves Yumeno tapping her fingers up and down her arms, picking at her cigarette issued scabs and wishing Harukawa was there to either slap her hand away or kiss them better.

“Good riddance!” says Ouma, taking a pointed sip from a chipped tea cup full of soda. “Harumaki-chan was super stinky. Couldn't breathe when I was in the same room as her, practically, nope!”

Yumeno sends out a letter to what might be Harukawa’s address anyway.

(she doesn’t get a response.)

 

.

 

December first hits them like an assassin (ha!) in the night, and Yumeno wakes up to find Ouma dangling and then dropping a pinecone in her face. She screams, he laughs and bolts out of her room, leaving her to rub her eyes and look at all the decorations he had set up while she was asleep (hadn’t she locked her door…? well, actually, this was ouma, who was she kidding).

The room itself isn’t too heavily changed, mostly with knick knacks placed here and there. It’s obvious that Ouma wasn’t the Super High-School Level room decor master, not in this life or any other one, but it’s the effort that counts, she supposes.

It doesn’t hurt to get excited for the Christmas season, not when they don’t have many other things to get excited for, nowadays. Even if their apartment suffers for it.

“Look what the cat dragged in!” Ouma says as Yumeno crawls into the kitchen. A quick glance into the living room confirms that yes, he already set up the tree and yes, it looks even worse than her room. “Yah-hoooo! I hope our dear Yume-chan had bunch of Christmas-y dreams!”

“Christmas isn’t even… that big a thing over here,” Yumeno yawns.

“Well, surprise, I’m actually an American! This sort of thing is _culture,_ as we say.” Ouma wiggles his eyebrows and takes a sip of hot chocolate from his Santa-esque mug. _“Oui oui.”_

“You are…?”

“Nope! Wow, Yume-chan must be at the very tippity-top of all dummies if she fell for something like _that,_ really!”

 

.

 

Agreeing to quit smoking on the spur of the moment is all well and good until Yumeno finds her fingers itching in her pocket to grab a pack that isn’t there. Ouma catches her doing this once, and all he does is wink and mouth “it was a _deal”_ and Yumeno hates it, hates Ouma and his smug-ass grin and all the trouble he’s causing her can’t she have just _this_ but she bites her tongue and breathes deeply.

The sort of smell of smoke that the cigarettes brought never fit a mage, anyways. The sort of smell she needed was mysterious, sweet, like piles of crushed up smarties that some kids would pretend were piles of cocaine and burnt licorice and cinnamon. Not cigarettes. Those only smelled sick.

She picks at fading scab scars and wishes she felt safe again.

 

.

 

They go out on the cold with mismatched socks and gloves one day because Ouma’s always cutting off the fingers of one half of the pair but never, ever the other half. He's enamored with the ‘coolness’ and ‘SWAG’ of it for all of twelve minutes before he throws them out and begins the process anew with another pair an hour later, so it's a waste of money but at _least_ it gives them something to waste money on in the first place.

So mismatched gloves it is, out in a plaza that Ouma suggests because “the other day, I saw someone get stabbed there and die and-- just kidding, just kidding! Seriously, Yume-chan, it would have been on the news, you’re so _pathetically_ gullible.”

That’s why they find themselves sitting on a wooden bench covered in lights, Yumeno going off about how _hard_ it is to care for a tea shrub and how Ouma should help her instead of switching out the water with vodka when he holds up a finger.

“Shh,” says Ouma.

“Don’tcha _shush_ me--”

“Shh,” Ouma says again, pushing the finger into her mouth and grinning. “Do you hear that, Yume-chan?”

Faintly, when Yumeno strains her ears, she _can_ hear that: the faint sounds of piano wafting through the air.

For some pathetic moment, what comes out of her mouth is “Akamatsu--” and Ouma sends her the most withering glare. “Sorry,” she mutters, and he rolls his eyes as he gets off of the bench and skips around the corner, hands stuck in his trench coat pockets.

The pianist sits on a metal chair (yumeno gets cold just thinking about it, does he know what the weather’s like) and he’s brilliant, absolutely so. Yumeno walks a little faster to get in step with Ouma, who pauses right in front of the man. He doesn’t look up.

There’s a sign that reads ‘BLIND AND WITHOUT A JOB - PLEASE DO NOT STEAL! GODS BLESS YOU FOR YOUR KINDNESS’ in messy markered handwriting propped up against the guitar case. Yumeno snorts; she’s not smart, but even she knows that such a sign is only going to tempt more thieves than ward them off.

She drops in a couple hundred-yen coins in anyway, and the man smiles up at her now, unseeing. It’s dumb, she knows it, but the way he can look through her sends jitters down her spine and she turns on her heel.

“C’mon, let’s go.”

“Yume-chan, don’t get ahead of your ugly self and wait a silly second, okay?”

Yumeno pauses. She frowns, turning around. “Ouma…?”

Ouma’s digging into his coat jacket, pulling out wad after wad of cash and shoving it into the pianist’s case on the ground like he’s dropping hot coals. Yumeno can do nothing but stare.

“Any requests?” asks the pianist with his same toothy grin.

“Claire de lune,” says Ouma, and then, “unless you’re too _dumb_ to know what song th--”

But the pianist has already elegantly switched from the former tune to the new, fingers tracing out the keys like they’re bones. It’s not the same way Akamatsu played the piano - Yumeno’s watched videos of her play too many times for her to miss the mistakes - but it sounds almost the same.

Ouma taps his foot a couple seconds before turning and walking to Yumeno. “Bo-ring!” he says loud enough for the pianist to hear. Yumeno shushes him hurriedly, but the pianist only smiles.

 

.

 

Santa Claus doesn’t come at night to their Christmas tree, nor does Grandfather Frost, Befana, or any of the Yule Lads. They wake up to the tree exactly as they had seen it the night beforehand, lights shining like cat eyes and the ground beneath it painfully bare of any sort of presents.

“Well!” Ouma hums, skipping over to the tree with a set of alpaca pyjamas bouncing over his binder. “Thiiiiiis is lame. _Phcheh.”_ He spits on the tree. “What a disappointing way to start my favorite day of the year! I hate it, I really do. Noooo gifts under the tree… what’s a little boy like me to do, huh? Finding out that Santa Claus isn’t real,” tears begin to gather in the corners of his eyes, “such a traumatic event will stick with me for _years_ and _decades_ and _centuries,_ I’m certain of it! I’m never going to make it! Never, ever!”

“Uh,” Yumeno clears her throat awkwardly. “Actually.”

“Oh woah?” Ouma sits himself down next to the tree, pulling off a cookie ornament and biting into it. “What is it?”

“I… I got you a gift, Ouma.” Carefully, gently, she picks up the gift she had carefully ordered and hand wrapped herself from inside one of the food packages (ouma would never look there, after all) and holds it out to Ouma. Even if he can’t see the design, it’s obvious that it’s a mug from the way the wrapping goes around it.

Ouma stares from the gift in her hands to Yumeno and then back again. He slams his head against the tile floor.

“O-Ouma?!” Yumeno grabs him by the shoulders and he wrenches himself out of her grasp, breath coming out of his nose in funny little wheezes.

He stares at her. She stares back. He begins to grin.

“Well, that’s just how bad your gift was!” he hums. “Disgusting. Absolutely so! How could you do this to me, Yume-chan.” He snorts. “Really. Not a gift befitting of a supreme leader like myself!”

He shoves the gift back into her chest. “B-but ya didn’t even open it,” Yumeno protests, and Ouma sticks out his tongue.

“I’m an esper,” he declares, and dashes away from the room.

 

.

 

Yumeno’s used to Ouma staying out till fuck-o-clock, but just because she’s _used_ to something doesn’t necessarily mean she has to like it.

She can hate Ouma all she wants, and she does, but that doesn’t stop her from staying up till 4 am marathoning whatever’s been recommended by a randomizer as she waits for Ouma to come home from another spontaneous bad brain night. When he does, she closes her eyes and sinks her head against the couch’s armrest and hopes he thinks she’s asleep.

She’s frozen like that until she actually falls asleep and then, come morning, she walks into the bathroom to see marker drawn all over her face like a tapestry. Sometimes it’s drawn with washable marker, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes Ouma ends up with with a slap across the face with some angry words to boot, and sometimes he doesn’t.

He’s not grateful for her concern, and she doesn’t care.

 

.

 

They agree to go to a cafe together the first day in after Christmas that isn’t too cold, a famous one that would most definitely have its reputation pulled through the trash and back if two of the _Danganronpa_ survivors were to get poisoned and die there. “If we go down, they go down with us,” Ouma hums, “and besides, death by chocolate is really _such_ a way to go! Or, chocolate cake, but that falls into the same category.”

It’s a bit of a grotesque concept, chatting about which items on the menu they found online would be the most likely to kill them as Yumeno sorts through her closet, picking up different articles of clothing and waiting for Ouma’s judgement. Most of the time, he just ended up shaking his head and crossing his hands in a big ‘X’. After yet another harsh rejection, Yumeno finds herself sighing.

“You know…” she says tiredly after nearly a full half hour of this, “you just kinda… say I look ugly in everything.”

“But it’s _true!”_ Ouma insists. “Yume-chan’s hair is the color of disgusting, icky ketchup. It's impossible to look good with that sort of a ‘do!”

Yumeno sighs again and settles on the dress she bought with Ouma months ago, and Ouma wears his dress, too, so they match pretty well. Ouma giggles and says he looks just like a fairy and Yumeno is an ugly, ugly witch, but when she looks in the mirror she doesn't hate her appearance as much as she usually does, for once.

They find themselves sitting at a table overlooking the street, a dirty contrast from the quaint and elegant atmosphere inside the cafe. Ouma drums his fingers against the table, propping his chin on the palm of his hand. Yumeno’s fist curls up in the hem of her dress and she breathes.

The ball of anxiety in her stomach is absolutely killing her. Someone gives them some complimentary tea when Ouma waves them over, but Yumeno can’t bring herself to drink it.

“I… needta go to the bathroom,” Yumeno says, and Ouma nods, acknowledging her as she skitters out of her seat.

There’s a flash of recognition in one of the waiter’s eyes as Yumeno asks for directions to the bathroom, but she’s too nervous to care (as if that made sense) and hurries off to do her business.

Washing her hands makes them realize how badly they’re trembling, and she looks up at her reflection as she squeezes soap into her hands. Her reflection stares back. She slaps her cheeks and bites her lower lip hard enough to leave a mark before she can trust herself to go back outside.

She forgets to dry her hands and only realizes this when she’s nearly back at her seat, so it’s far too late to simply turn around and wash them all over again. She groans and slides back into her seat. Ouma’s sitting on one of his hands, the other still drumming the table as he smiles at her.

“Your tea’s gotten cold!” Ouma says, and Yumeno rolls her eyes as she picks up her cup. “It’s gonna taste absolutely _disgusting_ now!”

She touches the surface with her tongue. “‘s not.”

“Mm, sounds fake, but okay!”

Yumeno takes a sip of her tea. It’s really good, so he’s lying, as per usual, and she takes another, draining half of the cup. Ouma’s silent as he watches her, the drumming of his fingers increasing in intensity and speed. Yumeno frowns and puts her cup down. “Hey--”

“Yume-chan, do you think they’re watching us right now?” Ouma says. “The people who died, I mean.”

Yumeno chokes on her tea and swallows it, looking up at Ouma. “Wha--”

“I mean! I was just _thinking_ about it, you know?” Ouma looks back out the window again. “Are we interesting enough to look at? Entertaining enough? Or maybe there are more interesting things to do up there in heaven. Assuming they all got into heaven. Assuming,” he laughs. “there _is_ a heaven? Or an afterlife?”

She looks at her reflection in the saucer. “Er… that’s kinda. There’s a lotta stuff to… consider, there. Maybe it’s just… it’s everyone’s own. Personal interpretation?” She takes another sip of her tea.

“Of course Yume-chan is too dumb to form her own personal opinions,” Ouma dismisses with a wave of his hand. “I’m not surprised, really--”

“That isn’t true. I,” Yumeno breathes. “Well, what do you think of the afterlife, then?”

“It doesn’t exist,” Ouma says immediately. “Either that, or it’s a ghost civilization! People go about in their day to day lives, except they’re ghosts, and they live in ghost towns and run for ghost office and have ghost friends and ghost weddings and ghost babies. And ghost taxes. The economy _really_ is terrible as a ghost, believe me!” He snorts and picks his nose, as if he himself were a ghost and he was speaking from personal experience. “I don’t know how they get _anything_ done as a ghost. It’s much better to be alive, yup yup!”

“Uh,” says Yumeno, and despite herself, yawns. Her eyes itch, and when she blinks, it feels a little bit harder to open them. She downs the rest of her tea and sets the cup on the table.

“But more realistically speaking, yeah! Once we die, we don’t exist. Implying we ever exist in the first place, _but_ that’s getting a bit too existential for some late afternoon tea, mm?” Ouma giggles to himself, a hand over his mouth like he’s some sort of smug anime girl from the 90s.

“Yeah…” Yumeno props her chin up on her hands sleepily. “Nn... Ouma?”

“Mhm?” Ouma bats his lashes.

“Why’re you… talking about this…?”

“Just something that’s been on my mind!” he chirps. “I was wondering if you thought Chabashira-chan was watching you all the time, maybe? Or, or,” he lowers his voice to a stage whisper, “what if Saihara-chan was watching us, right now? What if he was watching us all this time? What if he was watching when I lived instead of him? Instead of Momota-chan? Or Akamatsu-chan, or Iruma-chan... take your pick, really!"

“Well.” Yumeno rubs her chin. “Saihara’s… uhhh. He’s not alive right now, so…”

“So?” Ouma’s smile is as bright as a thousand suns.

“I don’t think it matters… _that_ much. But.” She heaves in a breath. “I think he’d be happy that you were alive.”

Ouma stares, unblinking. “Huh.”

“Don’t you ‘huh’ me.” Yumeno wags a finger at Ouma, but gets tired and so it’s only a short little wag.

“Huh!” Ouma says. “Well, that’s an opinion if I’ve ever heard one.”

“It sure is.”

“Hey, Yume-chan?” Ouma leans in close, grasping her hands in his and looking her in the eyes. “What do you think will happen to you, Yumeno Himiko, when you die? What do you think will happen to me when I die?”

Yumeno blinks once, twice, feeling her eyelids grow heavy. “Uhm…”

“Yume-chan? Are you okay there?” Ouma sounds distant, somehow. Yumeno pulls her hands away. “Aw, are you feeling sleepy? Am I really _that_ boring of company?”

“Nyeh… no…” Yumeno rubs her eyes and places her head on the table. She’s feeling sleepy, though, of course she is, and the cafe is just so _warm_ and the table feels really, really nice and she just can’t keep her head from slipping because it’s too much for her neck to support its weight right now.

“It’s okay,” Ouma says, or maybe it’s someone else but Yumeno’s mind is stuttering to a halt, slowly but steadily. She should care, she _knows_ she should, but all she really cares about in the moment is the fact that her eyelids are feeling heavy, _oh_ so heavy, and if she just… closed them, that would be really, really nice.

Ouma hops up from the table, skirt billowing around him and Yumeno is struck with the likeness of a jellyfish through her lidded eyes. “Yume-chan, I need to go to the bathroom too!” He flicks her on the forehead, and she puts her head back down on the table. “Sweet dreams, okay? I’ll place and eat your order for you!”

Yumeno mumbles, closes her eyes, and then shoots back up again as someone taps her shoulder, gripping onto their wrist as strong as she can.

It’s the waiter who was attending to them, and they stammer out apologies the same time that Yumeno does. “It’s, it’s just,” they finally get out, “uhm… we’re closing, now. Actually, we closed fifteen minutes ago, but no one wanted to… wanted to wake you up, miss.”

The gears turn in Yumeno’s mind and the sun casts long, orange shapes through the cafe’s windows. “Ouma isn’t here,” she says, and nearly laughs out loud when the waiter tries to pretend to be surprised that yes, they’re two of the three survivors from the fifty-third season of _Danganronpa,_ how amazing, how great, etcetera etcetera who cares, did they want her autograph.

“O-oh!” the waiter says. “If, if that's the person who came in with you, then he left roughly three hours ago. Is,” they try to put their hands over Yumeno’s, and she pulls away, “is everything alright?”

“Yeah. Sorry for makin’ you wake me up.” Yumeno digs into the pocket of her dress (she got it all stained when she was sleeping, what an utter waste it was going to be a pain to take out if she was able to take out the stain at all) and dumps a wad of cash on the table. “Here’s the bill.”

“Oh,” their eyebrows furrow, “excuse me, but that’s _far_ too m--”

“Keep the change,” Yumeno’s already out the door, stumbling on sleep-heavy legs and dialing Ouma’s cell. It goes to voicemail, so she gives him the doubt of ‘maybe he was doing something important like playing an idol game and couldn’t pick up’ and calls again after five minutes, mary janes tapping against the sidewalk’s concrete. That also goes to voicemail.

Suddenly, Yumeno’s dress feels far too tight, and she regrets not buying a more loose fitting one, a summer dress that would’ve floated around her instead of frills pinching at her skin and pulling her chest close. She takes in a shuddering breath, two three, and then calls Harukawa.

She picks up after the fourth ring. _“Hello?”_

“Harukawa,” Yumeno says. “i-it’s me. Yumeno.”

 _“Yeah, I saw the caller id.”_ Yumeno can practically see Harukawa roll her eyes. _“What do you need?”_

Yumeno scratches at the back of her phone. “Nn… uhm, how. How’ve you been.”

 _“I’ve been okay. Yumeno,”_ Harukawa sounds exasperated through the speakers, _“not to sound rude, but cut to the chase. If it’s just because you want to hear my voice or some sentimental crap like that, I appreciate it, but I really don’t care to talk.”_

“Oh.” Yumeno swallows, and it scares her a little how intent Harukawa is severing any connections from the killing game away, like an infected limb. “I… uhm, Ouma. Is gone.”

The other end of the line is silent for a few beats. _“Is he now.”_

“He is,” Yumeno bites her lip. “Harukawa, listen--”

_“Have you tried looking for him yet? Are you gonna file in something to the police?”_

“Well.” She shifts her weight from foot to foot. “N-no…”

 _“Yumeno,”_ Harukawa’s voice is gentle, now. _“I understand being worried, I really do, but it's going to accomplish absolutely nothing. Chances are, Ouma just ditched you and ran off for a prank of some sort. It's not like he hasn't done that before, right? So there's no reason to panic. He's at home, safe and sound."_ A pause.  _"I promise."_

“Okay.” Yumeno breathes in deeply, feeling the incessant thrumming of her heart slow down a couple beats. “Harukawa… this isn’t the time, but.”

_“But?”_

“I…” She pinches her nose. “I miss ya…”

The other end of the line is silent for so long that Yumeno has to check to see if Harukawa hung up. She hasn’t. _“Thanks…?”_ The bewilderment in her voice is off putting but too familiar for Yumeno to shrug off. _“Uh, listen, I’ll call you back if you really want to talk. Later.”_

“Okay,” Yumeno smiles nervously. “Uhm. I’ll let you know any. Ouma updates, then.”

 _“Alright,”_ says Harukawa. _“See you, Yumeno. Take care.”_

“Y-you too,” Yumeno stutters, and presses the _‘end call’_ button before hurrying to their apartment. He’s there, certainly. Not like any of the other dozens of places in her mind (top of the building painted on concrete under the dock on the beach in the cemetery at the aquarium in the tanks in the library under the rubble).

 

_._

 

Ouma stands on shaking, wobbly legs as Harukawa lets go of his neck, gasping for air as he struggles to recollect himself.

There is a line, and on one side of that line is Kiibo, Shirogane, Harukawa, Momota, Saihara, herself.

Ouma is on the other side, all by his lonesome. As he should be. As he put himself there.

(“you’re alone and pathetic and you always will be,” says the detective with a shaking, accusatory finger, and no one in the room breathes)

“I, I’m scared of dying…” Yumeno pulls her hat over her eyes, trying to hide her quivering with the disgusting amount of _hate_ she feels in the pit of her stomach, and Saihara glances over at her. She breathes and directs the bullet at Ouma, even if she knows he’s too much of a monster to care.

“...but nothing good will _ever_ come from surviving with you.”

 

_._

 

She smells copper as she fumbles for her keys. When she unlocks the door, Ouma’s form greets her, wrists sawed through and staining his dress red as he sits on the cushioned checkered chair. The wind blows through the balcony’s open doors and plays with his hair, wisps drifting in the air like cotton candy.

The tea from the cafe is out of her belly and onto the floor in seconds. Ouma’s bloodstained sleeves float in the wind like wings.

 

.

 

_part i: decay_

 

_FIN._

**Author's Note:**

> Someone drew fanart for this fic of Ouma in his dress! Thank you so so much; it's absolutely stunning https://twitter.com/ririrubii/status/919952711549882368 !!


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